1We often see the word “Terror” heading up the darker pages in the histories of twentieth-century regimes going under the general label of “Real Socialism.” Interestingly, it is a choice of label shared by communist and anti-communist commentators. The choice of the term in reference to certain events or periods carries with it the vexing question of the relationship between the French and the Russian revolutions. Is there, in fact, some sort of link connecting the latter—and thus the entire communist movement—to the former? If so, what might be the nature of such a link?

2Reasoning in terms of cause and effect, the entire theme appears improbable. The differences in “script” and “cast” are obviously so great that the very idea of interpreting the failed realization of socialist democracy—one of the major existential tragedies of the twentieth century—in these terms seems simply due to intellectual laziness or the literary frisson of recasting an already well-thumbed scenario of sure effect. Today we know everything about 1789. We do not know everything about 1917, but we do know enough to consider the two events as representing specific, autonomous cycles, whose conditions, circumstances, unfolding, and interpretative paradigms are unrepeatable and discrete within the great sweep of Western chronology.

3However, if the absence of the Great Revolution in the facts of 1917 is clear, its presence in the mythopoeia and in the complex apparatus of self-representation these facts immediately generated, is equally evident. However, in the early years of the Bolshevik state, it was virtually impossible to find publications in Russia that deliberately draw analogies between the two revolutionary experiences.1 This lacuna—which underlines a historic and theoretic distancing—is compensated for by a veritable proliferation of narratives of various kinds regarding the French Revolution, and young communists were regularly advised to read the biographies of Mirabeau, Marat, Saint Just and Robespierre and take them as models.2 This purely intellectual citation of “sources” and “Founding Fathers” is buttressed by a series of eye-witness accounts which describe the over-all scene in vivid, journalistic, tones: squares and crowds in movement through the streets present an iconography with little, if any, context in theoretic debate or the careful analysis of developing political action. Perhaps the classic example—still vibrant today—is John Reed’s epic reporting, an impressive progression of revolutionary emotions from its opening moments in a St Petersburg teeming with parades, red guards and impromptu bands playing the Internationale and the Marseillaise.3

4In the lexicon and the emotions of politics the Révolution is revolution itself. In the Révolution’s homeland, within the French political and academic culture which had created and fostered its mythic status, the linkage to the Jacobin narrative—which comes to include the whole period from 1789 to 1795—is virtually simultaneous with the October Revolution. The spectral nature of the two moments would remain a “given” in Marxist and, later, Communist Party, historiography for many years (at least until the death of Albert Soboul), and that historiography would be predominant in structuring the memory of the Russian Revolution. Thus, History was immediately set up against politics: it is precedent that establishes the norm for the present.

5To explain and legitimize the Russian Revolution, all one needs to do is affirm that the French Revolution constitutes its precedent: “Showing, with a brief analysis, that not only are there evident analogies between the methods adopted by the Bolsheviks and the French Montagnards, but that there are close ties between the two and a sort of logical kinship.”4 Thusly Mathiez opens a short essay aimed at justifying Bolshevik violence by analogy, on the basis of precedent. The case presented is that of the young revolutionary state, under siege, attacked by internal and external forces. It is in the name of what Furet will call “circumstances”—“that is, phenomena outside and alien to their own nature”5—that radicals, and later Socialists, absolved Jacobin excesses; and it is the force of those circumstances to which Communists will refer in absolving Bolshevik violence in Russia. “Circumstances” which, in the latter case, are generally not even defined or discussed, since it seems sufficient to call upon the “precedent,” almost as if the principles of common Law obtained before the assise of History.

6The same mechanism comes into play to explain the Terror, a separate chapter in revolutionary violence, and its twentieth-century counterpart: the Moscow trials. The terrible purges with which Stalin scourged the Soviet Communist Party between 1936 and 1938 were presented as a necessary cure for “counter revolutionary plots” menacing the Socialist State and, to make the thesis more convincing, he compared them to Robespierre’s campaign to destroy the followers of Hébert and Danton.6 Here again temporal logic is subverted: the past, instead of reflecting itself in the future, is the future’s unnatural mirror. The present generates a “compatible” past. The same procedure was later adopted to “explain” the wave of trials that swamped the communist leadership in the newborn popular republics of Eastern Europe and the renewed persecutions of 1952 in the USSR.7

7The French Communist party, fully aligned with the official Soviet position, again took the question head on, once more defining what was going on as an anti-Thermidorian battle. The Italian party instead adopted a more mediated approach: the 1936-1938 trials were legitimate because an anti-Thermidorian battle was going on; today’s trials are legitimate because they occur in a situation which replicates the former, legitimate, Soviet experience. So in Italy the only explicit precedent invoked to explain the new post-war wave of trials is the twenty-year-old Soviet experience (which had been, however, commented upon at the time with definite references to Robespierre). Here, in March 1938, is Mario Montagnana, a former worker and one of the most active members of the Italian Party in exile (of whose political office he was a member) at a meeting of the Party’s Central Committee held in the USSR:

An effort must be made to explain the nature and the significance of the trials to our comrades and to Italian workers and to avoid the illusion that everything is clear, especially in Italy. This is the first revolution which has gone forward without interruption for twenty years. Jacobin terror was brief because [...] there was Thermidor. If Tallien had not cut off Robespierre’s head, Robespierre would have cut off Tallien’s [...]. In the USSR, the Thermidorians didn’t win. They are paying for their crimes.8

8In other words, Zinoviev, Radek, and Bukharin were executed because they decapitated Robespierre. And if it is true that this “historical” interpretation appears in an official document only in this one case—albeit in a meeting at the highest levels—it is equally the case that it reflects a real leitmotiv for Italian communists no less than for their French contemporaries.9

9The trials of the 1930s were necessary to save the revolution from Thermidorian reaction; those of the second post-war years will be necessary because they oppose the same defense to a still vaster conspiracy. With this similitude, Paolo Robotti refuses the anti-Semitic character of the 1952-1953 trials without any discussion, merely citing precedent: the pre-war “plotters” were also, he writes, mostly Jews. The article, which appeared under his by-line in January of 1953 in the Italian communist-party daily, L’Unità, is of exemplary cynicism. These, he says, are the data:

When—in 1936, 1937 and 1938—the counter-revolutionary gangs were routed and crushed in the USSR, in the August, 1936, trial of the Zinoviev gang, of sixteen accused, eleven were of Jewish origin. In the January 1937, trial of the Piatakov-Radek gang, of seventeen defendants, six were of Jewish origin. In the March 1937, trial of the Bukharin-Rykov gang, of twenty one accused, eight were of Jewish origin.10

10The communist leader “explains” the presumed Western philo-Semitism leading to the false accusation of anti-Semitism, by ascribing it to a new alliance between the Vatican, Capital and—with recourse to a wellworn conspiracy theory—“Jewish bankers.” No attempt was made to explain why the percentage of Jewish defendants was so high in twenty years of trials: “counter-revolutionary gangs” have no political content; they might only have moral content, but counter-revolution is beyond the limits of any conceivable political morality.

11It is on these uncertain frontiers of historical narration that we encounter the Terror. The Terror is a chapter apart in the broader story of revolutionary violence. It was a government policy inaugurated at the same time as the idea of the nation as the “sacred body” of popular sovereignty. The Jacobin experience made of the Terror an instrument to save the revolution as a whole—that is, a process stretching from the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et citoyen to the Constitution, and from the Constitution to an active citizenship which is republican, and only secondarily democratic and representative. That is what was at stake in what hasty historiography calls the Great Terror, unleashed by the Jacobins in the Spring of 1794. Transferred to the twentieth century—apex of the Western political experience of totalitarianism—“terror” and “terrorism” change sides, color and aim. And that is why, in the twentieth century, the Great Terror is called upon as a fundamental paradigm, as purpose and ritual. A terror unleashed when the homeland frontiers are no longer directly menaced by the enemy; terror as the chilling “administrative” machine of an egalitarian and moralistic “metaphysic”;11 terror which enacts “the phantom counter-weighing the political impasse—product not of a reality of conflict, but of the Manichean ideology which imposes a division into the good and the evil, as well as a sort of diffuse panic.”12

12It is a terror which up ends its own generative justification to become the alternative to representative democracy and its “limits,” a step beyond the presumed limits of constitutional fictioiuris in favor of “natural” laws which the masses obeyed, in favor of impelling forces which were, in reality, those of nature itself, the force of elementary necessity.13

13But there is another aspect. This regeneration of the past in favor of the present, this recourse to mythology to produce new myths, has infused the circumstances of the Great Revolution and of the eighteenth century with the anxieties of the twentieth. The debate over Rousseau’s political project as a “totalitarian democracy” which somehow gave rise to the revolutionary experience and its “deviation”—(dérapage) so dear to Furet—is anything but new. The Terror as the final product of the “obsession with legitimacy” dominating the period between 1789 and Thermidor, 1794, that is, the moment in which revolutionary France “makes of the paradox of democracy explored by Rousseau, the only source of power.” It is the obsession leading to refusal of the theory of “reciprocal control”—so dear to Montesquieu and the American revolution—in the name of a principle that “integrates society and State into the discourse of popular will and”—with the Terror—“pieces together, in revolutionary practice, a sort of divine right of public authority.”14 As Hannah Arendt puts it: “Rousseau’s or Robespierre’s ‘general will’ is [another form of] divine will, which needs only ‘want’ to produce law.”15 Such transferrals are probably not wholly legitimate at the level of historic analysis; what is certain, is that they are not opportune.

14For an analysis of the contaminations between Revolution and revolution—Terror and terror—it would seem more useful to look at the “live” sources of social action brought to light as experiences in long-term history (longue durée) by recent anthropology, the history of mentality, social history and the analysis of myth. The revolutionary event is, of course, a collective experience, a widespread emotional climate, underpinned by strong values. The very idea of liberty—and the idea of the people that nurtures it—imposes a fundamental ritual apparatus: it is in the rites, in the “feast,” that the union of the social body reveals itself most completely. In turn, “feast and revolt” are entwined according to rigorous procedures and impelling rhythms.16 The exceptionality of the event confers on it a central role as communicative propaganda, but perhaps something more as well: the Jacobin celebration is the locus in which public opinion brings itself into line with the general will, obviously made flesh in the Jacobins themselves.17

15In this collective climate which, as Jean Duvignaud notes, transforms mentality into ideology:

Politics becomes show, an aesthetic exercise aimed at persuading and engaging groups of people it means to integrate as a nation, partial symbol of society as a whole, society in act.18

16In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as modern times march towards disenchantment, the production of myths has the role of making sacred the profane. Not by chance, one of the keys to the Terror is forged on 20 Prairial, 1794, a day dedicated to the Supreme Being—a new holiday created in a conscious mythopoeic act by Robespierre: the complex liturgical apparatus was to officiate a public cult for the Virtuous Man, subject of his oratory as well as of his meditations.19 Here, in this historiographic site, the contamination finds explanation and becomes operative, the archetype gains foundations and is legitimated.

17This is the archetype; but as we have already noted, the facts of the twentieth century are very different indeed. And that is why it is important to explore the degree to which such diversity is veiled by the representations offered. The Soviet secret police are already present in 1918, but within the context of a lively battle over the symbols and processes of legitimization, a battle fought principally outside of Russia. The exact date of the birth of the Cheka is not of prime importance here: in the beginning, its repressions are hidden, not openly theorized. Indeed, shortly before the organization was set up—a month after the occupation of the Winter Palace—Lenin presents the Socialist State in construction in terms that exclude the presence of “heavy-handed” bureaucratic and repressive structures, describing a State organized to “extinguish itself.” It was, instead, significantly enough, Trotsky who pronounced the word Terror, during his organization of the Red Army, but his subsequent misfortunes seem to have minimized the impact of this declaration.20 It is only with the Great Purges—the Moscow trials—that the Terror is officially called into play. For, as the Jacobins had shown, Terror and repression are not synonymous: Terror, an exceptional act in defense and protection of the general interest, must have a ritual—public—dimension (ceremonies or trials)21 if it is to fulfil its function, sweeping beyond a civil conception of liberty to a new, politically defined, liberty. Repression is a bureaucratic instrument for the conservation of power exceeding the rules that have fixed its limits.

18If the model offered by the Revolution—fed by external circumstances—can be contested with reference to 1794, that model becomes literally unserviceable in reference to Stalin’s Moscow. The USSR of 1936 is not the Russia of the civil war, but a state that is recognized as such among the nations of the world. Not only is it not the France of 1791, it is not that of 1794 either: its ruling Socialist party is not at war with hostile powers. In the Jacobin archetype Terror and war are closely linked. In later instances, the links become weaker until they vanish altogether. The menace is introjected. In 1936 there is no encirclement—we need only think of the Franco-Soviet alliance, or the excellent relations (including military agreements) with Fascist Italy. War with Nazi Germany is a possibility, not a fact but, rather, a probable future event. After the end of the Second World War—this time with the Anglo-Americans—is again a probable event, but it is also a representation, a scenario made hyper-realistic by the nuclear perspective. As Zubok put it, it was

A further justification for pushing the Soviet Union into a sort of highly secret “black box” and for continuing to count on the extreme wartime policy of mobilization and production.22

19For Mao Zedong, war would not be a problem; it was merely a “paper tiger” and, in reality, not even a policy motor. The Great Helmsman, despite his homage to Marxism-Leninism, broke with that tradition and that genealogy. Mao is outside of the pattern which links France and Russia. It is not famine or any external military danger that sets in motion the most terrible of purges: the Cultural Revolution. We need only think of how the more orthodox pro-Chinese organizations—those less “liberally inspired” and most closely linked to sources in Beijing describe it. In the story of his “organized” trip to China, published in the Italian press, Pier Sergio Solinas writes:

Today youth represents a great mass force, a motor determining the present and the future of the Chinese revolution. They are the ones who, in 1966, struck the spark in the universities and the secondary schools for the Cultural Revolution or—as some here call it—the “Great Cultural Proletarian Revolution.” The spark then set flame to the plains, spreading the new ideas, the extreme battle against the old morality, in the cities and villages of China.23

20The enemy that occasions the new processes is all here, in the expression “old mentality.” The Revolution no longer feeds on its surroundings, on circumstances that oblige it to radicalization; in a certain sense, the Revolution has come of age.

21More analytical—and certainly free of outside suggestions—the Manifesto (monthly magazine around which, in 1969, the first and most representative Marxist group of the Italian New Left gathered) reported the Chinese experience from which it drew inspiration and energy without any reference to precedents—no NEP, no Thermidor, no encirclement:

Though China, like the Socialist countries [of Europe], found itself faced with the contrast between the development of productive forces and bureaucratic/centralized planning, between the growth of democracy and the power of a party and the state apparatus coinciding with it, instead of chosing a partial return to the market and “liberalization,” it took the opposite road: a flight forward, towards the totalization of direct Socialist administration, the foundation of a grass-roots political power. It was the “Great Leap”; it was the communes.
[...]
If, with the partial defeat of the “Great Leap Forward” China returned, after 1966, to some form of privatization of land and of commerce, to market margins, around these policies, Mao built up a political conflict which would crest in the cultural revolution and whose stakes were a new radicalization of class conflict, the foundations of power and its real social subject—the masses—and thus the repositioning of the social dialectics of transition not in the relationship between people and Party (people and State), but within the people themselves.24

22All the other New Left groups—all of which dedicated at least one article of the first issue of their newspapers or magazines to the Chinese revolution—held to a similar respectful tone. They showed that a mutation had occurred. While, in the optics of the “Old School” formed by the Third International, the Revolution in the Third World coincided with what was deemed to be a “democratic-bourgeois” phase25 and the onus of representing a model fell upon the industrialized countries, for Mao the opposite was true—it was the Third World which offered a model. It was the industrialized countries—suffocated in a development that divides, corrodes, confuses—which could no longer find either the way or the resources for revolution. Until the mid-1960s, the Vietminh, the Algerian FLN, the Cuban barbudos, were the heroes of the good fight, at whose side the right-thinking First World should stand in solidarity; thereafter, the Chinese Red Guard, Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s guerrillas or Vo Nguyen Giap, became the epigones of a still possible revolution—support became affiliation.

23The young Italian university students gathering in city squares or at the factory gates were too confused, impatient or disillusioned by the realities of Italian political life to talk about solidarity. They needed a model they could believe politically and morally clean and the Third World offered it. In a word, the Third World was the essential element reintroducing the theme of revolution into the context of mature, stabilized, capitalism, and nowhere was this more true than in Italy, where an official, European, Marxist world, “frozen” into conceptual immobility, was completed by a rather shoddy pre-meritocratic economic and political system running largely on cronyism and luck.

24But if we are no longer the teachers, but have become students, then our History can no longer teach us anything. A problem indeed when the new teacher fails us, and bewilderment finds no recourse except the old, outworn, paradigm recently cast aside. When Mao suddenly “opens to America”—and does so by holding out a hand to what may be the most widely detested and discredited president of the country’s history, receiving Nixon in China with all smiling honor, the anonymous editors of Lotta continua are reduced to old school notes about towns under siege, international plots, more or less holy alliances, revolutionary uprisings:

We aren’t scandalized by the diplomatic relations the Popular Republic of China is seeking—with growing insistence—to establish with bourgeois governments—including the United States. China lives on the edge of war, surrounded by the policy of aggression adopted by both American and Soviet imperialism. The Chinese people know they are preparing to face a possible war, and the Cultural Revolution was a decisive victory because, among other results, it restored the response to an eventual imperialistic attack to the direct initiative of the masses.26

25So we are back to the language and symbols of old Europe, or at least so it seems. In reality, this is not much more than a conditioned reflex: it is no longer possible to turn back, the trench separating the old tradition from the new revolutionary vocation is too deep. The old and young communists are radically different: not wrinkles, but DNA separate them.

26It is an insurmountable diversity that takes over the symbolic level as well, setting in motion a process of transformation and substitution. We have already mentioned the rising myth of the Third World. We need to note as well the disappearance of the founding role assumed by the Terror in the construction of the communist identity: it no longer forms part of the historic or ideal heritage claimed by the New Left. The only “traditional” reference remaining is the Paris Commune, whose centenary in 1971 falls in the midst of the whole process of transformation. Yet the very episodic character of the episode ends up by weakening it as event.

27The Commune had been important to Marx and Engels and central to Lenin’s theory; Mao had referred to it as well. Clearly, it is this last name that carried special weight for Europe’s New Left and, most particularly in Italy, that brought on a rupture with previous tradition, representing de facto an end to continuity in the evolution of the Socialist and Communist movements. The tragic—and precipitous—epilogue to that revolutionary experience made it refractory to manipulation. It is certainly possible to sing hymns to the Soviet cult and excommunicate the USSR, but—especially if the guiding role of the Party within the Soviets themselves is central to the discourse—it becomes really arduous to answer the basic question: “How did the Socialist State turn into a new bourgeois and imperialist entity?” It is hard to condemn the errors of the Russian communists and absolve the State they built; it is very easy to indicate the Communards’ errors without having to contest the Commune they created. So it is not at all odd that the centenary of “the first proletarian State in history” was so widely celebrated by all the New Italian Left with the sole (and significant) exception of the group around the Manifesto—the only group, as we have noted, to confront the problem of the over-all heritage of the Italian Communist Movement and to come to grips with its tradition, in which the Soviet myth played no small part.

28Lenin links his theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat to a reading of the Parisian experience of half a century before. Mao moves from Lenin, but, in reality, he goes so far as to theorize a mystique of violence as something other than the unpleasant but necessary task of repression, or the redemptive and creative role of terror:

Brezhnev and company have loudly affirmed that “those leading the proletariat must reduce violence to a minimum in every phase of the battle” and “adopt more moderate forms of coercion”; that “armed combat and civil war are accompanied by enormous sacrifices, by the suffering of the popular masses, by the destruction of productive forces and the annihilation of the best revolutionary leaders.”27

29If violence, like revolution, is only a means, it makes no sense to be scandalized by those who declare it necessary to “reduce violence to a minimum at every phase of the battle.” At most, one might criticize the banal superfluity of such an affirmation. To contest the idea that violence is in essence a bitter medicine, to be dosed with attention, means insisting again on a nucleus of thought radically different from the communist tradition. In fact, though the degree of violence present in Soviet society was very considerable (arbitrary arrests, physical and psychological torture, death), it was a fact that was always ably veiled and the response to whatever external accusations there might be was as simple as it was efficient: deny everything; shut yourself into a castle of lies that even the Twentieth Congress did not wholly demolish.

30On the contrary, the communist press had always insisted upon the tranquil, happy, nature of life in the USSR. Even the public trials—besides furnishing a “quantitatively distorted” image of the purges, which, far from decimating only the “deviated” elites, had a tragically mass nature—never led to public gallows or firing squads. The only available images showed the accused—as far as possible—in good physical condition and neatly dressed. The trial meant to be the incarnation of justice, not that of revolutionary violence. Violence, with its burden of horror, was thus ascribed to adversaries. This norm held true for the whole movement—as the Italian Communist Party’s commemoration of the Resistance shows: it never indulges in images of executions of the guilty, though always affirming that those deaths meted out justice. Even the macabre scene of the bodies of Mussolini and Claretta Petacci hanging upside down like carrion in Piazzale Loreto (the end result of an extraordinary concourse of disparate events), was seen by the Party as more a source of embarrassment than anything else.

31On the contrary, press, graphic art and films had shown in great detail the death dealt out by the Fascist assassin. In this regard, nothing changes even with the 1960s and the mobilization against American intervention in Vietnam: so much so that the flyers and pamphlets distributed by the Youth Association of the Italian Communist Party will often be banned or confiscated by pro-American public authorities due to the horrifying images aimed at showing the devastating effects of American bombing and reprisals. In the end, it is only in the homeland of Utopia that there can be neither horrors nor pain. Consequently, those who believe the USSR to be Utopia realized must eschew any reference to such themes. The Soviet Homeland had, in fact, created a new kind of place, a utopia that was not situated in the future, but raised up in the present, a place whose description is possible only in the oxymoron Utopia realized.

32In China the story is very different. If the USSR cuts its ties to the future as a land where the future is now (so much so that the pro-Russian press often confuses “popular science” with Science Fiction in presenting information regarding Soviet science), China casts itself free of the present as well, deeming it to be a place where the past is actualized (manual labor, rurality, the nearly omnipotent will of the heroes). The permanent nature of the Maoist revolution gives even the Western world a shiver of the long forgotten thrill that comes from living in the epic times of foundation, where History—of which Revolution is always the beginning and the end—begins. An epoch of battle which one can—indeed must—consecrate to a full-fledged cult of violence.

33For the old socialists and communists, revolution was nothing but a phase of progress; for the followers of the new orthodoxy, it was above all a moral necessity. For the former, revolution must be purged of every possible tendency towards degeneration: brutal violence, or violence that was not absolutely necessary, would end up draining the revolution of its sense; the latter believed revolution must and ought to produce extreme acts, acts of purification—a catharsis in which executioner and victim might even turn into a single ambiguous tangle, so long as blood flowed and, in its flow, realized History.

34In this connection it is useful to turn again to the Chinese commemorations of the Paris Commune and the anti-Soviet polemics, for only by leaving the realm of logic for that of ethics, can we understand affirmations so contradictory and incongruent. Here again is the text of Viva la vittoria della dittatura del proletariato!, still talking about Russian leaders:

To find a sort of justification for its sophism regarding the “transition to power,” this gang of traitors has not hesitated to twist history to its own ends preaching that the Paris Commune was “at the beginning” “an almost bloodless” revolution.28

35Affirmation which the authors judge manifestly false on the basis of the amount of blood shed during the violent repression; but the repression cannot be situated “at the beginning” of the revolutionary action of which it was, in fact, the tragic epilogue. Further, whatever the language, common sense cannot call the victims of violence “violent”; that word belongs to those who attack them. Certainly a revolution that produces very few arrests or executions cannot be called violent. If the thousands of dead are the dolorous result of the reaction, it should be all too evident that it is to its perpetrators and not to the revolution that the epithet “violent” must be applied, unless, of course, we attribute special value to violence.

36The rupture between a communism born on the wave of the suggestion of the Cultural Revolution and the communism forged under the sign of red October and the Soviets, is therefore substantial and not merely a question of political opportunity. Though Moscow and Beijing certainly influenced their tributaries according to their interests as rival powers in ways that were always barely veiled but almost never outright, the differences between the two communisms were still real, deeply rooted and unyielding. In fact, Italian Communist Party leaders immediately leveled detailed and severe criticism at the Cultural Revolution.

37By 1966, Giorgio Napolitano, Mario Alicata,29 Emilio Sarzi Amadè,30 Franco Bertone and Carlo Galluzzi had, like the Austrian Leopold Spira, expressed doubts about what was going on in China. The accusation of anti-Soviet attitudes came first, but as early as September of 1966 Giorgio Napolitano—who would one day become president of the Italian Republic, and was always considered the Italian Communist Party’s “shadow Secretary of Foreign Affairs”—questions the very nature of the Cultural Revolution, claiming a specific Italian role among the communist parties within the Soviet orbit. In an editorial appearing in the Party journal, Rinascita, this first-rank leader writes:

We were the first communist party to open an explicit discussion with our Chinese comrades, analyzing the contradictions and pointing out the errors becoming evident in the socialist world. [...] We believe it is our duty at this juncture not to keep silent, but to dissent, to openly criticize the policies of the Chinese Party. The refusal—in practice and at the theoretic level—of the unity of socialist forces in the battle against imperialism and for peace, is in contrast to the essential needs and values of our movement, just as not only the “excesses” but the criteria inspiring the “proletarian cultural revolution” are in conflict with any proper vision of the construction of a socialist society and civilization. It is our duty as internationalists to say this today, however reluctant we may be to do so, however heavy-hearted we may feel. These words are the sign of the dramatic consciousness that serious, unforeseeable damages have occurred, intervening to deviate a great process of socialist construction like the one which had begun in China with the victorious revolution, delaying the great objective—the creation, under the banner of socialism, of a new community of countries and peoples, based on the unity of the USSR and China.31

38The Edizioni d’Oriente’s new left quarterly, Vento dell’Est (East Wind), promptly responds. In its Rettifche e discussioni (Corrections and Discussions) column, Mario Cannella dismisses the Party’s critique as banal and superficial, unworthy of a serious rebuttal:

[The article] fires point blank at the wave of “austerity,” of “egalitarianism, of “China-ization” (and this is a gross falsehood); it opposes the “absurd extremist exasperation” of the cultural revolution and the criteria inspiring it which “are in conflict with any proper vision of the construction of a socialist society and civilization” (G. Napolitano). We think that the banality and the superficiality of such an affirmation needs no comment.32

39Even the tone of this “reply” is less complex, in a certain sense less “political,” than the article which provoked it. Its accusations are not accompanied by such ritual, comradely, expressions as “to say this today, however reluctant we may be to do so, however heavy-hearted we may feel.” There is, rather, a certain complacent brutality, a citation from President Mao replaces the classic argumentation and the rhetorical patterns of socialist oratory (which assigns to History the role of “source” from which explanation and justification of policy proceed). In some sense History itself—or the idea of revolution—has become flesh and blood, to speak directly, man to man. From this point of view, despite some apparent analogies, the cults of Stalin and Mao take absolutely different forms and significance:

President Mao has always taught us that “a revolution cannot come about elegantly, delicately—in a friendly way, with courtesy and self control.” For those who—like the leaders of the Italian Communist Party—have lost any faith in the masses and their revolutionary autonomy, the ensuing disorientation is total. Faced with the “excesses” of the red guards, let us leave them to their anxieties. As for us, our motto is: Well done!33

40Terror for terror’s sake, divine wrath, not the temporary expedient to which policy recurs to overcome some equally transient problem; for it is the will, and not politics, which moves heaven and earth. “Precedent” is no longer necessary; Mao has definitively replaced Robespierre.